by Nick Svolos
Man, I hated being right sometimes.
***
I lost track of how many over-the-phone interviews I did. They all blurred together. The TV news hosts all asked the same questions. I gave the same answers. It felt like it went on forever. The all night news business is insatiable. Still, when something like this breaks and you're at the middle of it, you kind of have to do it.
I quit answering my phone around five that morning, and went out for a quick run to clear my head. By six, I was driving back downtown to rejoin the stakeout. Of all the cops around Jefferson Plaza, the members of Task Force Eleven seemed to be the most shaken by the news of the arrests. I think, in the backs of their minds, The Angels were something of a security blanket. If some superhuman threat arose, something they couldn’t handle, they could always rely on the knowledge that The Angels were only a phone call away. Now they were working without a net.
I discussed the situation with Dawson. “This isn’t entirely a surprise, Captain. The team knew there was a pretty good chance Glorious Leader would pull a stunt like this. Ben Jefferson has a list of people he can call if things get really hot.”
“Good to know,” he said with a wry smile. “Do me a favor, though, and keep that under your hat.”
“Sure, but why?”
“I want ‘em to be a little worried. It’s good for ‘em. Sure, the plan is to pull in superfolks when we need ‘em, but we can’t be calling them for every little thing. The whole purpose of this task force is to learn how to do this on our own. They need to work through the implications of what it means to be a cop in this sort of environment, and I need to see who’s got what it takes to tough it out.”
“Ah. You expecting folks to transfer out?”
“Naw, I think I picked this crew pretty well, but if there’s a weak spot, this would be a good time to find out.”
So, I kept quiet as I rejoined the various teams on duty around the housing project. As the sun started to set, I wound up in an unmarked car with Lieutenant Jennifer Williams and her partner, Sergeant Steve Burris. One of the many things I learned from sitting with the cops was what they liked to listen to while on the job. Dawson liked jazz, Sandoval was a metalhead, which often led to conflict with his partner Powell, who was more of a top-forty guy. Williams and Burris liked talk radio.
The guy they had on, a local host in the coveted afternoon drive-time slot, was holding forth on the North Korean situation. Outrage over the capture of The Angels, not to mention how it was accomplished, was the theme of the day. The host and his callers sounded pretty hawkish.
“I tell ya, I don’t see any way we can avoid goin’ to war after this,” Burris said. “This is just too much.”
“Yeah, it looks that way. I just can’t figure out what they’re thinking over there.” Williams looked at me in the rear-view mirror and asked, “How about you, Conway? What’s your take on all this?”
I sighed. After doing four hours of commentary that morning, this was about the last thing I wanted to talk about. The thought of Helen sitting in a containment cell, God knows where, was almost more than I could stand. “It was the smart play,” was about all I could manage.
“What? How you figure?” she ejected, coming just short of spewing coffee on the windshield.
I shrugged, resigning myself to the conversation. “Buys him time. If Congress goes forward with a war vote, he’s got some high-value hostages to threaten. Ties the President’s hands, at least for a little while. The President doesn’t want to go to war either. They can drag out negotiations for a long time. I assume they’re using that time to figure out who really sent those robots.”
“You don’t think it’s him?”
“Naw, it doesn’t work. The Lords of Atlantis say the robots didn’t come by sea, and I believe ‘em. So does Ultiman.”
“So, who sent ‘em?” Burris asked.
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” I replied. “Somebody who can sneak them in by air without our satellites or radar picking it up, maybe. Some sort of stealth tech.”
“Solve that one and maybe they’ll finally bump you to Lieutenant, Steve,” Williams added.
“Yeah, I’ll get right on that.”
The radio station cut to the news, and we fell into a tense silence as we listened for any new developments. There weren’t any.
The station went to commercials, and I decided to change the subject and maybe get an answer to something that had been nagging at me for a while. “Hey, maybe you guys can clear something up for me. When I started working on this Jorgensen story, one of the first things I did was go to the cops with what I knew. Long story short, I got the impression that they were dragging their heels. Like they didn’t want to find him. What gives?”
Williams suddenly developed an intense interest in her phone, but Burris turned sideways in his seat and faced me. “Is this off the record?”
“Does it have to be?”
“Yes.”
I didn’t see any room for negotiation in his eyes, so I agreed.
“It’s one of those unwritten rules. There’s just some things you don’t do if you want to make it to retirement. Beat cops don’t go looking for superhumans. They aren’t equipped for it. They aren’t trained for it. Hell, we’re the people that they’re gonna be calling in for that sort of work, and we’re nowhere near ready to handle a flying teenager who can throw a bus at us. My guess is that the Santa Monica cops got word that Panhandler was dealing with this kid and decided to leave well enough alone.”
I let that sink in for a few seconds. “Yeah, OK, I guess that makes sense. That’s why they didn’t tell the parents, and it explains why they stonewalled me.”
“Yep. If word got out, they could be forced into a potential confrontation with two supers. Not a good idea.”
“So, just spit-balling, here, but why didn’t they call Panhandler directly? You know, talk it over and work things out.”
Williams looked up from her phone and back at me. “We’re not as plugged in with these people as you are, Conway. Hell, you got most of these people on speed-dial. That’s why Dawson is keeping you around. We’re supposed to be learning as much from you as you are from us.”
“Consider it a ‘community-based policing’ sort of thing,” Burris added. “If you know the people in a community well enough, you know who to call when things get weird.”
I nodded. I’d never given it that much thought, but they were right. Over the course of my career, I’d come across a lot of information. Five or six secret identities, a couple of lair locations, stuff like that. It’s not all that hard if you know what to look for. I realized I’d have to be careful around these people. Some of the stuff I knew could get someone killed if I slipped up.
Something caught my eye. “Um, speaking of weird, is that something we should be looking at?”
As one, the cops turned their heads back to the street. From our position about half of a block away from the Jefferson complex, we saw a large panel truck pull up next to the building, followed by a black SUV. The driver got out, and after a quick look around, went to the back and rolled up the rear door and extended a lift. As a pair of guys in gang regalia came out of the tower, five men got out of the SUV, four of whom armed themselves with what appeared to be military-styled automatic rifles. The fifth man appeared to be overseeing the operation. I couldn’t make out any features from this distance, but he certainly had an air of being in charge of things. Burris snapped off the talk station as Williams called it in.
I pulled out my cell phone and sent a text to my ace in the hole. “Showtime. Back door.”
Two gang members clambered into the truck and came back out a few seconds later burdened with a stretcher. The driver lowered them with the lift and they went into the building via the door a third gangster held open. Two of the gunmen followed them in with the overseer guy while the other two took up positions outside the door.
“Damn, they’ve posted guards,” Burris noted, pe
ering through a pair of binoculars. “Well armed, too.” Williams updated Dawson with the newest development. We squirmed into our kevlar vests, easier said than done within the confines of the car, but we couldn’t risk leaving the vehicle and revealing our position. In addition to the vests, we had each been issued a gas mask, and we attached these to our belts. I double-checked that my identification card was visible, hanging from the lanyard around my neck. Finally, I inserted the set of earplugs they’d given me. If it came to gunplay, we’d be glad we had them. Gunfights are loud. In a closed-in space, like an abandoned apartment building, you could suffer some permanent hearing loss in seconds. They don’t show that in the movies.
Tense moments followed as we awaited orders to move. “You remember your role, right, Conway?” Williams asked.
I nodded. I’d been well-drilled in the approaches each team would use and what I was supposed to do. “Follow you guys, stay in cover, keep my mouth shut and do what you tell me to do.”
“Good. And don’t forget, try not to get shot.”
“Yeah, I know. What is it with you guys and paperwork?”
“Actually, I was thinking that if they shoot you, they’ll probably start shooting us next,” she grinned as she pulled her balaclava over her head. “But, yeah, I’d like to avoid any extra paperwork, too. So don’t get shot. Don’t forget your mask, either.”
Ugh. This mask thing was a bone of contention for me. It itched, limited my peripheral vision, and the damned thing hung up like velcro on my five-o'clock shadow. But, the real issue was that wearing a mask gives you a sense of anonymity. Anonymity that gives you the feeling that you can get away with stuff that maybe you wouldn’t do if you had to take responsibility for it later. Don’t believe me? Go take a look at any comments section on the internet and get back to me.
At any rate, this wasn’t the place for this debate. This was their turf, and I had to follow their rules. I put the damned thing on.
I heard a rumble behind me and turned to see a large police van, lights off, advancing down the street. As it passed our car, we got out and fell in behind it, sheltered from the guards by its bulk.
The van picked up the pace, and we broke into a trot to keep up. As we entered the street bordering Jefferson Plaza, the driver switched on every light the van had, plus the siren for good measure. I fell back a bit as the cops in the van dropped to the ground and took up their positions, forming a column around the two task force members and yours truly. This was our insertion team, tasked with getting us to the sixth floor with enough people to get the job done.
The guards at the door now had a decision to make. They panicked and made the wrong one. They opened fire on the van and were quickly put down by an unseen SWAT team sniper. He must have been using a suppressor, because I never heard the shots. Neither did the guards. One second the night was rent by the high-registered staccato racket of what I later learned were AK-47s, and the next the two men were crumpled heaps of cooling flesh on the landing outside the back door. The police van cut right at the corner, and two of the cops moved off to secure the driver, who made the right decision and didn’t offer any resistance. They cuffed him, patted him down, and made a quick sweep for threats in the truck’s interior before rejoining the column as a couple of officers from the perimeter moved to haul him off to a safer location.
I was now at the end of the line, and I squatted down behind the SUV while the team started working their way through the door and up the stairs. There wasn’t anything I could do other than get in the way, so I just watched them work. I looked to my left and became intrigued by the yawning open door in the rear of the panel truck, so I kept low and took a look.
Inside the truck were two body bags, or at least, that’s what they looked like to me. My breath caught in my throat as I levered my way up into the bed. I crawled over to the closest one and unzipped it. It was a girl, fifteen, maybe sixteen years old, wearing a school uniform. Good lord, these guys must have grabbed her on her way home from school. My hands shook a little as I pressed my fingers to her throat, and my heart sank when I failed to find a pulse. I was about to give up and go check the other bag when I realized I was so hyped up on adrenaline that I couldn’t find my own pulse, much less that of an unconscious girl. I took a few breaths and forced myself to calm down before trying again. My heart leaped in my chest when I pressed my fingers against her throat again. It was slow and soft, but the pulse was there.
The other bag held a boy with a sparse growth of hair on his chin, and to my joy, a similar pulse. I couldn’t rouse either of the children, so I figured their captors must have sedated them. This brought to mind the conversation I’d overheard where the doctor guy told the other one to follow the process. Yeah, he’d said something about sedating them. That settled it.
I squirmed back out and waved one of the cops on the perimeter over. “There’s a couple of kids in there,” I told her. “I think they’re sedated. I’d expect them to have superpowers, so make sure the EMTs are ready for it when they wake up, OK?” The officer nodded, and called it in on her radio.
At the rear door, the last of the insertion team were going in, so I ran over to follow. I made it just in time, too, because some more cops were herding a stream of junkies my way. I dodged out of the way and started climbing the stairs. The air reeked of sweat and the kind of filth that I didn’t even want to try to describe. Let’s just say the plumbing in this place probably hadn’t worked in years.
I’d made it to the fourth floor when the gunplay started. I knew just enough about the LAPD’s tactics to be an educated idiot, so I wouldn’t presume to guess how it all went down. What was supposed to happen was that three teams would invade the building and work their way up to the sixth floor. There was the back door team that I was a part of, and two more were to come in through the front door and the street side via the fire escape. Their objective was to time things so that they all arrived at the same time and, through sheer force of numbers, present such an overwhelming presence that the bad guys would quickly see the futility of resistance and give up without a fight. Getting involved in a shootout in the middle of a rickety, abandoned tenement-turned-drug-den in the middle of a densely populated part of town was pretty far down the cops’ list of preferred outcomes. I figured the plan must have been thrown out the window when the guards opened up with their machine guns downstairs, warning the gang and giving them time to set up their defense, but that was just me making an educated guess. A million other things could have gone wrong.
The remaining officers rushed up the stairs toward the sounds of combat. The stairs weren’t wide enough for me to get out of their way, and I had no choice but to be swept up in their flow. We bogged down at the landing to the sixth floor as the policemen awaited breaks in the firefight to leapfrog their way deeper into the building. When it was my turn, I dove into a doorway recently vacated by the cop using it as a firing position and rolled deeper into the apartment to make room for the officer behind me.
Shots echoed—deafening even muffled by the thin walls and our hearing protection—throughout the floor, and a few stray rounds broke through the wall above my head. A muffled grunt came from somewhere as someone caught a bullet and went down. I had no idea whether it was a cop or a criminal until I heard someone shout out, “Man down!” That meant it was one of the cops. A flush of anger spurred me into action. I had to do something.
I looked out the window at the next door building. It had a fire escape like the one on the street-facing side of the building we were in. This led me to wonder if there was one on this side. It made sense; the people living on this side of the building would need a way out if they were cut off from the interior stairs. The cops had told me to stay low, so I crawled on my belly down the filthy, cracked linoleum towards the bedroom.
The bedroom was filled with discarded furniture and other debris, forcing me to get up and clear a path to the window. Once there, I looked out and saw the fire escape. The window was paint
ed shut, but I found a metal bed slat to use as a makeshift crowbar. I dug at the paint until I could work the piece of metal under the rotting wood of the sill and shoved down. Rather than pushing the window up, the metal bent. Useless.
Cursing, I yanked the slat back out and smashed the window. Should have just done that in the first place. I had enough presence of mind to run the bar around the edges of the window to dislodge the remaining glass and stepped out onto the steel mesh landing to make sure it hadn’t rusted through. It seemed steady enough.
I thought of calling out to the cops to let them know and then remembered that there were a bunch of bad guys within earshot. I couldn’t risk broadcasting the information to them, so I turned to climb back through the window.
That sudden, unpredictable movement saved my life. A bullet struck one of the fire escape’s supports with a metallic ptang accompanied by a bright shower of sparks uncomfortably close to where my head had been an instant before. I glanced over my shoulder as my reflexes jolted me through the open window and I saw a couple of the gangsters, firing inaccurately as they advanced down the landing towards me.
I cursed my inattention and stupidity. Of course, the gang members would have thought about using the fire escape. They knew this building. Hell, they worked here.
Racing back to the officers at the door, I let them know they were about to be flanked. They wasted no time in reacting to the news, and by the time the gang members made it to us there were four officers waiting in ambush. To their credit, they gave the criminals one last chance to surrender, shouting, “Police! Freeze!” rather than simply opening fire. The gangsters reacted in the worst way possible, turning their guns on the cops, and were quickly cut down.
Pressing their advantage, the officers moved out onto the platform and started their own flanking maneuver. In the distance, I spotted Dawson. Even wearing his balaclava there was no mistaking his bulky form, leading another team from the other end of the building. I guessed he had the same idea. I followed the officers on my end at a respectful distance.
